DIY E-Books

At the press of a button, convert the tried-and-trusted POD format for Perl documentation to the digital Mobi format for the Kindle and a wide variety of mobile devices running the Kindle app.

It is hardly surprising that articles for my Perl column all originate as manuscripts in POD format (Figure 1). After all, this documentation format, which has been tried and trusted for decades, is easy to type and read, and a number of tools exist for easy conversions: to HTML, to man pages, to LaTeX – and hence to PDF or PostScript – or to the format required by the Linux Magazine editorial staff [2]. Thanks to the CPAN EBook::MOBI module, it is even possible to generate Mobi files from POD and publish home-grown material as e-books for Kindle reading devices and apps.

On the Amazon Kindle eBook reader, you can save personal clippings, or “highlights,” in a file; later, you can connect the Kindle to a USB port on a Linux machine and grab the data with a Perl script that stores it in a database.